La Vila del Joy is an early music festival offering high-quality musical experiences in one of the best-preserved Renaissance temples in the Valencian Mediterranean, the Church-Fortress of Santa Maria y la Asunción in Vila Joiosa. In this eleventh edition, we are taking on a new challenge typical of the great festivals of contemporary Europe: we are concentrating the five concerts and two conferences on consecutive days between 8 and 12 October, with 9 October as the central date of La Vila del Joy.

 

 

High-quality ensembles from our country give us the privilege of travelling back to the Middle Ages and its melodies, the rich Renaissance distilled in songbooks from Elvas in Portugal, Neapolitan Montecassino, the contrasts of Italian, German and Valencian Baroque, all performed with period criteria and instruments. And to contextualise the repertoires related to the Valencian region, we will add two conferences at the Vilamuseu, as we did on the 10th anniversary of the festival celebrated last year.

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The festival will open on Wednesday, 8 October with a programme dedicated to the instrumental virtuosity of Antonio Vivaldi, il prete rosso, who eclipsed the finest musicians in Europe in the first half of the 18th century. Alongside pieces by Vivaldi for flute, oboe, violin, bassoon and organ, we will hear other brilliant German composers, such as Handel, Telemann and Fasch, performed by Vísperas de Arnadí, a Baroque group that on this occasion will feature Pep Borràs, a leading performer on historical bassoons and bassoonets, in 2008 and 2018.

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The concert on 9 October, the day commemorating the arrival in Valencia of King James I from Montpellier and the County of Barcelona, will feature a group that also comes to us from those lands. The group Hirundo Maris is led by Catalan singer and harpist Arianna Savall and Norwegian tenor and multi-instrumentalist Peter Udland Johansen. The programme they propose, ‘Cants del Sud y del Nord’ (Songs of the South and North), is a journey that connects the Mediterranean with the North Sea. Through the songs, subtle bridges are established where a Catalan song and a Norwegian tune rediscover common rhythms and styles, just as a Norwegian romance and a Sephardic song share the same tonality.

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One of the most important Valencian voices is undoubtedly that of Èlia Casanova, whom we will have the pleasure of hearing on Friday 10 October accompanied by Belisana Ruiz on the vihuela, and percussionist Pedro Estevan. In this concert, they will perform a splendid selection from the Portuguese songbook of Elvas and the Cancionero Musical de Palacio from the royal palace of the Catholic Monarchs. We would like to highlight the participation of another pioneering performer and leading figure in early music percussion, Pedro Estevan, born in the neighbouring town of Sax, who has accompanied Jordi Savall on numerous recordings and concerts.

 

On SATURDAY 11 October, we are treated to a programme featuring the music of the medieval apocalypse announced by Saint Vincent Ferrer throughout the Crown of Aragon and much of Europe, performed by soprano Pepi Lloret and the Renaissance group Lucentum XVI. The announcement of the end of the world and the day of judgement, when the Almighty would be relentless with Christian evils. Ferrer was canonised by Pope Borgia Calixto III in 1455, and from that time we recover the Montecassino Songbook with music from the Neapolitan court under Nostrat's command, as well as from the nations where Vicent preached.

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At the festival's closing concert on SUNDAY 12 October, we will have the pleasure of hearing the voice of soprano Pilar Moral and the group Música Encuentro, conducted by Francesc Valldecabres, with a formation of two violins, cello, theorbo and organ. Música Trobada is a platform for research, recovery and dissemination of early and baroque music, mainly from Valencia's musical heritage. As an example, they will present a programme dedicated to anonymous pieces from the 18th century recovered by the group and sourced from the archives of Valencia Cathedral.

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As a complementary activity to the festival, some of the programmes will be contextualised with lectures at the Vilamuseu. Specifically, on Wednesday 8 October, we will be able to attend a lecture in which the leaders of the Hirundo Maris group, Arianna Savall and Petter Udland Johansen, will talk about the north-south relations of the programme they will offer in concert the following day. On SATURDAY 11 October, Juan Carlos Gomis Corell, Doctor of Musicology and professor at the Castellón Conservatory of Music, will talk about the musical works of praise to Vicent Ferrer, known as gozos, from the 15th century to the present day, serving as a prelude to the concert on the same day, L’apocalipsi de Vicent Ferrer (The Apocalypse of Vicent Ferrer), performed by Pepi Lloret alongside Lucentum XVI.

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